Enabling Coverage-Based Verification in Chisel

Ever-increasing performance demands are pushing hardware designers towards designing domain-specific accelerators. This has created a demand for improving the overall efficiency of the hardware design and verification cycles. The design efficiency was improved with the introduction of Chisel. However, verification efficiency has yet to be tackled.

One method that can increase verification efficiency is the use of various types of coverage measures. In this paper, we present our open-source, coverage-related verification tools targeting digital designs described in Chisel. Specifically, we have created a new method allowing for statement coverage at an intermediate representation of Chisel, and several methods for gathering functional coverage directly on a Chisel description.